McConnell noncommittal on House GOP fiscal cliff proposal

12/4/12 3:07 PM EST

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t say Tuesday whether he supports Speaker John Boehner’s plan for avoiding the fiscal cliff, though he praised House GOP leaders for proposing a counteroffer to the White House.

“I think it’s important that the House Republican leadership is trying to move the process forward. Frankly, I had hoped we would be accomplishing more in the real talks that are going on privately, but I can tell you there’s nothing going on privately that’s not going on publicly,” McConnell told reporters after a Senate Republican conference lunch. “We’ve wasted an enormous amount of time here sparring back and forth in public. And it strikes me as a good time to get serious about the proposals.

“So I have no particular observation other than I commend Republican leadership for trying to move the process forward,” McConnell added.

The proposal House Republicans presented to the White House Monday would cut the deficit by $2.2 trillion, including $800 billion in new tax revenue. The plan President Barack Obama offered last week calls for $1.6 trillion in tax hikes, mostly through raising rates on the wealthiest Americans, and gives Obama authority to raise the debt limit.

Republicans have panned the Democratic proposal as a nonstarter and urged the president to play a bigger role in negotiations. Some GOP groups criticized Boehner's counteroffer, too, for not being conservative enough.

“I hope at some point here the president will understand there’s gonna be no solution to this without his involvement,” McConnell said. “I like to remind people there’s only one person out of 307 million who can sign something into law. Only one person in the country can deliver the members of his party to support a deal that he makes and that’s the president.”